Tag: Town of Shadows

Got back from DC, from a wonderful weekend, from the lovely Chelsea and am now here, in the cold north. DC is a strange city with the worst metro in the world. No one seems to live there and all the buildings are gigantic. Monuments to tyranny and oppression framed as beauty and democracy.

It’s a peculiar book, relying on more than sentences and stories to give you the life it holds within. Full of odd math problems and experimental notations and lists and poetry and definitions that seem all wrong, Stern disorients the reader by dropping us in the middle of this town where nothing is quite what it seems to be, where absurdity and magic are just a skipped breath away.

In his Dead trilogy (Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things), Richard Calder creates a cataclysmic future where the difference between nature, technology, reality, time, life, death, and imagination all swirl and blend together, becoming more and more indistinct as the narrative unravels at a dizzying pace only to somehow come back together as something both magnificent and visceral.

The kinetic language will sweep you up until you’re reeling from the poetic. The first novel contained in the trilogy is certainly the most straightforward, if one can even use that word here. It’s fitting that it’s printed as a trilogy because the second two novels are so inextricably bound that to read one and not the other is to dive in an orphic nightmare and leave drowning.